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(092112)

Evolution: Rationality
vs. Randomness

By Dr. Gerald Shroeder

Dr.
Gerald Schroeder is a former professor of nuclear
physics at MIT and member of the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission. He is the author of "Genesis and the
Big Bang," "The Science of God," and the recently-published
"The
Hidden Face of God." (See the Book
List for references)

At the basis of the theory
of neo-Darwinian evolution lie two basic assumptions: That changes in morphologies
are induced by random mutations on the genome; and, that these changes in
the morphology of plant or animal make the life form either more or less successful
in the competition to survive. It is by the aspect of nature's selection that
evolutionists claim to remove the theory of evolution from that of a random
process. The selection is in no way random. It is a function of the environment.
The randomness however remains as the basic driving force that produces the
varied morphologies behind the selection.

Can random mutations
produce the evolution of life? That is the question addressed herein.

Because evolution is
primarily a study of the history of life, statistical analyses of evolution
are plagued by having to assume the many conditions that were extant during
those long gone eras. Rates of mutations, the contents of the "original DNA,
" the environmental conditions, all effect the rate and direction of the changes
in morphology and are all unknowns. One must never ask what the likelihood is
that a specific set of mutations will occur to produce a specific animal. This
would imply a direction to evolution and basic to all Darwinian theories of
evolution is the assumption that evolution has no direction. The induced changes,
and hence the new morphologies, are totally random, regardless of the
challenges presented by the environment.

With this background,
let's look at the process of evolution. Life is in essence a symbiotic combination
of proteins (and other structures, but here I'll discuss only the proteins).
The history of life teaches us that not all combinations of proteins are viable.
At the Cambrian explosion of animal life, 530 million years ago, some 50 phyla
(basic body plans) appeared suddenly in the fossil record. Only 30 to 34 survived.
The rest perished. Since then no new phyla have evolved. It is no wonder that
Scientific American asked whether the mechanism of evolution has changed in
a way that prohibits all other body phyla. It is not that the mechanism of evolution
has changed. It is our understanding of how evolution functions that must change,
change to fit the data presented by the fossil record. To use the word of Harvard
professor Stephen Jay Gould, it appears that the flow of life is "channeled"
along these 34 basic directions.

Let's look at this channeling
and decide whether or not it can be the result of random processes.

Humans and all mammals
have some 50,000 genes. That implies we have, as an order of magnitude estimate,
some 50,000 proteins. It is estimated that there are some 30 million species
of animal life on Earth. If the genomes of all animals produced 50,000 proteins,
and no proteins were common among any of the species (a fact we know to be false,
but an assumption that makes our calculations favor the random evolutionary
assumption), there would be (30 million x 50,000) 1.5 trillion (1.5 x
1012 ) proteins in all life. (The actual number is vastly lower). Now let's
consider the likelihood of these viable combinations of proteins forming by
chance, recalling that, as the events following the Cambrian explosion taught
us, not all combinations of proteins are viable.

Proteins are coils of
several hundred amino acids. Take a typical protein to be a chain of 300 amino
acids. There are 20 commonly occurring amino acids in life. This means that
the number of possible combinations of the amino acids in our model protein
is 20300 or in the more usual ten-based system of numbers, 10390 . Nature has
the option of choosing among the possible 10390 proteins, the 1.5 x 1012 proteins
of which all viable life is composed. Can this have happened by random mutations
of the genome? Not if our understanding of statistics is correct. It would be
as if nature reached into a grab bag containing a billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion
billion billion billion billion billion billion billion billion proteins and
pulled out the one that worked and then repeated this trick a million million
times.

But this impossibility
of randomness producing order is not different from the attempt to produce Shakespeare
or any meaningful string of letters more than a few words in length by a random
letter generator. Gibberish is always the result. This is simply because the
number of meaningless letter combinations vastly exceeds the number of meaningful
combinations. With life it was and is lethal gibberish.

Nature, molecular biology
and the Cambrian explosion of animal life have given us the opportunity to study
rigorously the potential for randomness as a source of development in evolution.
If the fossil record is an accurate description of the flow of life, then the
34 basic body plans that burst into being at the Cambrian, 530 million years
ago, comprise all of animal life till today. The tree of life which envisioned
a gradual progression of phyla from simple forms such as sponges, on to more
complex life such as worms and then on to shelled creatures such as mollusks
has been replaced by the bush of life in which sponges and worms and mollusks
and all the other of the 34 phyla appeared simultaneously. Each of these bush
lines then developed (evolved) a myriad of variations, but the variations always
remained within the basic body plan.

Among the structures
that appeared in the Cambrian were limbs, claws, eyes with optically perfect
lenses, intestines. These exploded into being with no underlying hint in the
fossil record that they were coming. Below them in the rock strata (i.e., older
than them) are fossils of one-celled bacteria, algae, protozoans, and clumps
known as the essentially structureless Ediacaran fossils of uncertain identity.
How such complexities could form suddenly by random processes is an unanswered
question. It is no wonder that Darwin himself, at seven locations in The Origin
of Species, urged the reader to ignore the fossil record if he or she wanted
to believe his theory. Abrupt morphological changes are contrary to Darwin's
oft repeated statement that nature does not make jumps. Darwin based his theory
on animal husbandry rather than fossils. If in a few generations of selective
breeding a farmer could produce a robust sheep from a skinny one, then, Darwin
reasoned, in a few million or billion generations a sponge might evolve into
an ape. The fossil record did not then nor does it now support this theory.

The abrupt appearance
in the fossil record of new species is so common that the journal Science, the
bastion of pure scientific thinking, featured the title, "Did Darwin get it
all right?" And answered the question: no. The appearance of wings is a classic
example. There is no hint in the fossil record that wings are about to come
into existence. And they do, fully formed. We may have to change our concept
of evolution to accommodate a reality that the development of life has within
it something exotic at work, some process totally unexpected that produces these
sudden developments. The change in paradigm would be similar to the era in physics
when classical logical Newtonian physics was modified by the totally illogical
(illogical by human standards of logic) phenomena observed in quantum physics,
including the quantized, stepwise changes in the emission of radiation by a
body even as the temperature of the body increases smoothly.

With the advent of molecular
biology's ability to discern the structure of proteins and genes, statistical
comparison of the similarity of these structures among animals has become possible.
The gene that controls the development of the eye is the same in all mammals.
That is not surprising. The fossil record implies a common branch for all mammals.
But what is surprising, even astounding, is the similarity of the mammal gene
the gene that controls the development of eyes in mollusks and the visual systems
in worms. The same can be said for the gene that controls the expression of
limbs in insects and in humans. In fact so similar is this gene, that pieces
of the mammalian gene, when spliced into a fruit fly, will cause a wing to appear
on the fly. This would make sense if life's development were described as a
tree. But the bush of life means that just above the level of one-celled life,
insects and mammals and worms and mollusks separated.

The eye gene has 130
sites. That means there are 20,130 possible combinations of amino acids along
those 130 sites. Somehow nature has selected the same combination of amino acids
for all visual systems in all animals. That fidelity could not have happened
by chance. It must have been pre-programmed in lower forms of life. But those
lower forms of life, one-celled, did not have eyes. These data have confounded
the classic theory of random, independent evolution producing these convergent
structures. So totally unsuspected by classical theories of evolution is this
similarity that the most prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journal in the
Untied States, Science, reported: "The hypothesis that the eye of the cephalopod
[mollusk] has evolved by convergence with vertebrate [human] eye is challenged
by our recent findings of the Pax-6 [gene] ... The concept that the eyes of
invertebrates have evolved completely independently from the vertebrate eye
has to be reexamined."

The significance of this
statement must not be lost. We are being asked to reexamine the idea that evolution
is a free agent. The convergence, the similarity of these genes, is so great
that it could not, it did not, happen by chance random reactions.

The British Natural History
Museum in London has an entire wing devoted to the evolution of species. And
what evolution do they demonstrate? Pink daisies evolving into blue daisies;
small dogs evolving into big dogs; a few species of cichlid fish evolving in
a mere few thousand years into a dozen species of cichlid fish. Very impressive.
Until you realize that the daisies remained daisies, the dogs remained dogs
and the cichlid fish remained cichlid. It is called micro-evolution. This
magnificent museum, with all its resources, could not produce a single example
of one phylum evolving into another. It is the mechanisms of macro-evolution,
the change of one phylum or class of animal into another that has been called
into question by these data.

The reality of this explosion
of life was discovered long before it was revealed. In 1909, Charles D. Walcott,
while searching for fossils in the Canadian Rocky Mountains, came upon a strata
of shale near the Burgess Pass, rich in that for which he had been seeking.,
fossils from the era known as the Cambrian. Over the following four years Walcott
collected between 60,000 and 80,000 fossils from the Burgess Shale. These fossils
contained representatives from every phylum except one of the phyla that exist
today. Walcott recorded his findings meticulously in his notebooks. No new phyla
ever evolved after the Cambrian explosion. These fossils could have changed
the entire concept of evolution from a tree of life to a bush of life. And they
did, but not in 1909. Walcott knew he had discovered something very important.
That is why he collected the vast number of samples. But he could not believe
that evolution could have occurred in such a burst of life forms, "simultaneously"
to use the words of Scientific American. This was totally against the
theory of Darwin in which he and his colleagues were steeped. And so Walcott
reburied the fossil, all 60,000 of them, this time in the draws of his laboratory.
Walcott was the director of the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. It
was not until 1985 that they were rediscovered (in the draws of the Smithsonian).
Had Walcott wanted, he could have hired a phalanx of graduate students to work
on the fossils. But he chose not to rock the boat of evolution. Today fossil
representatives of the Cambrian era have been found in China, Africa,
the British Isles, Sweden, Greenland. The explosion was worldwide. But before
it became proper to discuss the extraordinary nature of the explosion, the data
were simply not reported. It is a classic example of cognitive dissonance, but
an example for which we have all paid a severe price.

At this point we must
ask the question, what has produced the wonders of life that surround us? The
answer may be implied by those very surroundings. In that case the medium would
be the message!

(082703)

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